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commercetools is a leading commerce platform company powering the next era of commerce for ambitious enterprises. The company enables AI-driven solutions, bridges digital and physical shopping experiences, and helps industries connect with customers in new ways.
As a Senior Search Engineer on the Discovery Team, you will build the retrieval layer behind product discovery for some of the world's most demanding commerce brands. Search is evolving: shoppers now type full sentences instead of keywords, and increasingly the client calling the API is an AI agent rather than a person. The team is taking semantic and hybrid retrieval to general availability while tackling hard problems—making it fast, affordable, and measurably better across enterprise catalogs, and determining what comes next. You will join this work at every layer, from query understanding down to the vector index and the cost of a single query.
Key responsibilities:
- Design and implement search functionalities in a PaaS ecommerce Scala backend
- Develop in a scalable, multi-tenant architecture
- Analyze user needs and discuss technical approaches with stakeholders
- Test software components for usability, functionality, and performance; work closely with Product Management and DevOps
- Participate in on-call rotations with a worldwide distributed team for production systems
The role is hybrid, requiring three days per week in the Munich, Berlin, London, or Valencia office.
Requirements:
- 5+ years of experience as a Software Engineer working in search
- Experience building search solutions on top of engines such as Elasticsearch (preferred), Solr, OpenSearch, or similar
- Aspiration to constantly improve yourself and learn new technologies
- Fluent English communication skills for international teams
- AI Aptitude: genuine curiosity for using AI tools to work smarter and effectively, with drive to learn and apply them in your role
Nice to have:
- Experience with modern search stacks and strategies to optimize search relevance (Vector and Hybrid Search, Learning to Rank, Re-ranker)
- Experience developing REST APIs and knowledge of scalable event-driven architectures (queues, notification topics, sharding, replication, load balancing, failover)
- Experience working with Scala or other functional programming languages
- Experience with infrastructure work and technologies like Helm, Kubernetes, and Rust
